Nonetheless, providers still incur the infrastructure, support, and licensing costs of these legacy systems. Obviously, it’s better to retire these systems, but the critical information stored within them is needed for the continuity of care. Legal data retention requirements also make it difficult for organizations to take legacy systems offline.
However, in a case study published by MediQuant, a midsized healthcare provider realized $15 million in savings over a 10-year period by retiring just three legacy applications, migrating the legacy data to an active enterprise archiving platform and reducing the following costs:
- Software licenses
- Annual hardware maintenance
- OS migrations
- IT personnel costs
- Loss of efficiency when searching legacy systems
Cost savings reported by the 140-bed hospital were obtained gradually. In the first year, their application retirement yielded $200,000 and the year after it rose to $1.4 million.
The results obtained by MediQuant’s clients are confirmed by a 2019 study conducted by KLAS. They studied the clients of major healthcare data archiving solution providers and showed that 85-percent of healthcare organizations that retired their legacy applications and chose health data archiving had a positive ROI.
Benefits MediQuant Delivers by Archiving Legacy Healthcare Data
Apart from the tangible cost savings accruing from archiving legacy healthcare data, what are the other benefits?
1. Legal and Regulatory Compliance
To comply with Medicare regulations, healthcare providers need to store patient data for at least 10 years after the last date of treatment. Some states require lifetime retention, while others allow providers to purge records after a specific number of years. Using a robust archiving solution can automate the retrieval, retention, and purging process.
Migrating historical data from expensive legacy systems to an archive platform keeps organization’s in compliance with data retention regulations at a much lower cost.
2. Reduced Risk of Data Loss
As operating systems and in-house servers get older, there is a greater risk of data loss or corruption. Archiving legacy system data in a more stable and secure cloud storage system eliminates this risk while ensuring the legacy data is available for audit or use by physicians at the point of care.
3. One-touch Data Access
Improvements in archiving technology make it possible to view a 10-year medical history with the touch of a button. This is in complete contrast to keeping old patient printouts in a large binder and storing them in an offsite storage unit. Today, with well-designed archiving software, all old patient charts, documents and images can be accessed electronically with a well-designed data archive. Clinicians and staff simply use their web browser to access the legacy patient data they need with just a few clicks.
4. Integration of All Legacy Records
While the systems that initially created and stored the data may have been disparate, an archive platform aggregates it all into one, single, secure, centralized archive. Organizations more easily leverage this information for reporting on business trends, research, population health and other needs.
Discover More Benefits of Data Archiving with MediQuant
To see how data archiving can help you save a significant amount of money each year and get more value from your legacy data, connect with MediQuant today. We will demo our archiving software solutions and demonstrate how they can provide cost-effective and consolidated access to legacy data.
